Some of us have been going beyond simply avoiding the frenzied mobs at the mall the day after Thanksgiving, for a number of years. We intentionally avoid any purchase on that day. This "Black Friday" full of obligatory consumption, angry parking, elbows, whining kids and glazed countenances is not one…
See them floundering after their cherished possessions, like fish flopping in a river starved of water.
Sutta Nipata 777 (From What Would Buddha Do? (1999)).
A friend of mine recently returned from an extended trip to Egypt. He found it striking that the 18 million residents of Cairo lived in tightly packed conditions and that they owned so very few possessions. Based on his own observations, the average resident of Cairo owned about 10% of the property owned by the average American family. My friend’s estimate was about on the mark. Most Americans would certainly describe most residents of Cairo to be “poor.”
Amidst this material “poverty,” though, my friend noticed numerous signs of family togetherness and harmony that he doesn’t often see in the U.S. Parents and children were spending time with each other, smiling at each other, playing together and apparently enjoying each others’ company. How could this be, that people appeared to be so happy when they owned so little? As my friend described what he saw, I couldn’t imagine Americans getting along that well if someone took away 90% of our possessions. In fact, we’d become embittered and we’d be at each other’s throats.
My friend’s comments caused me to think of the enormous amount of material possessions that Americans have and crave. We have shameful amounts of material possessions. We have many times more stuff than we need. Yet we work very hard to have ever more.
We are afflicted with the all-consuming epidemic “affluenza,” …
In Missouri, Republican legislators charged with getting to the bottom of a problem, have produced a fine example of spurious causal linkage that ought to go down in history with the assertion made by certain agents of the pope to Michelangelo that, since one of his marbles had taken seven years to complete, the new one for which he had requisitioned four helpers, would therefore take 28 years to complete–four times seven, you see, equals twenty-eight. It never occurred to them to divide, only multiply.
Which seems to be a problem Republicans have with regards to certain problems.
Their conclusion in this instance is that the rise in illegal immigration over that last three decades can be attributed to abortion. Specifically, because some forty-five million abortions have been performed since Roe v. Wade, those millions of potential Americans represent the short-fall in our labor pool which illegal immigrants are filling.
I haven’t laughed so painfully in a long time. Not over this sort of absurdity.
The Democrats on the same committee have refused to sign off on the report, but the report is now public, and all the Republicans signed it, hence alleviating any doubt (had there ever been any) where they stand on the issue of illegal immigration. Obviously, we should go on an accelerated program of creating a second baby boom to stem the tide of all those undocumented workers stealing American jobs. It will, of course, take about 18 years for the program to produce any tangible …
According to this recent news item on MSNBC, Emily Gillette, 27, filed the complaint with the Vermont Human Rights Commission late last week against Delta Air Lines, for kicking her off of a flight between Burlington and New York City. Gillette said she was breast-feeding her 22-month-old daughter as their…
This is more about history of science than about modern answers. Some of the latest methods for calculating how old the Earth is are succinctly summarized here at www.talkorigins.org.
One of the more readable of the many innumerate and unscientific rebuttals to a few of the dating methods can be found at http://www.allaboutcreation.org.
In brief, before the 18th century scholars generally accepted that the Earth was created shortly before man began keeping records. But then came “the Enlightenment”, and systematic record keepers began turning up (correlating) all sorts of things that could only make sense if the world were older than previously assumed.
For example, fossils were already a problem for a Young Earth outlook in the 1700’s. Given the predictably small percentage of any animal population that gets caught in the conditions that allow fossilization (one big flood lasting for weeks won’t result in fossilization), and the number of different fossil species found, there isn’t room on the planet for them all to have had living populations in the same few thousand years! Fortunately, different fossils are found in specific layers, the same layer for a given fossil type anywhere on the planet, allowing them to be spread out over a few hundred different epochs. Of course, this stretches the world time into at least millions of years.
Another example: …